


STAGE BLOOD

by jaekyu



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Ambiguous Relationships, F/F, F/M, Infidelity, Power Dynamics, Secret Relationship, tbh this is basically just a succession au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:53:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26756098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: Family. Fortune. Envy. Jealousy. Privilege. Passed on legacy.Seulgi knows she's heard it before, but she's not sure where: everything in the world is about sex — except sex. Sex is about power.
Relationships: Bae Joohyun | Irene/Kang Seulgi, Bae Joohyun | Irene/Kim Junmyeon | Suho, Kang Seulgi/Kim Jongin | Kai, Kang Seulgi/Suh Youngho | Johnny, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	STAGE BLOOD

**Author's Note:**

> hey, do you guys know that i like [Succession](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77PsqaWzwG0&ab_channel=HBO)? yeah, i really like Succession. this fic was really inspired by succession.
> 
> basically after the subunit dropped i was obsessed with the idea of seulgi and irene being the trophy wives of some corporate legacy brothers and, like, hating their husbands and having a secret affair. that seemed so sexy to me. so i wrote it! and somehow johnny got in here because, well, it's me!
> 
> decided to give my very diligent beta a break with this one, so i'm sorry if there's more mistake than usual! alex works very hard and deserves a breather on occasion <3

> __you're all humming live wires under your killing clothes_ _  
>  __get over here I wanna kiss your skinny throat_ _  
>    
>  __you're a wasp nest_ _  
>  **— THE NATIONAL**

> men  
>    
>  want to fix you  
>  save you  
>  or fuck you  
>    
>  I can't be fixed  
>  and I don't care to be saved  
>  _— Jeanann Verlee_

**i.**

On a big boat just off the coast of Malta, Seulgi kicks off her shoes and leans over the railing. Her grip falters around the metal, all of it damp with sea water, but it does inspire nervousness within her.

She’s on the third floor. That’s hard to believe, really, that a boat would have three floors. But here it is, isn’t it? This is the life she lives now. The wind whips the tendrils of hair that fall from her ponytail about her face. There is chatter from somewhere else on the boat; a lot of distinctly male voices, always talking like everyone should be listening. Like it’s a blessing for them to share every miniscule thing that crosses their minds with the world.

The sea around them is relatively calm. The rock of the boat is just not quite rhythmic. Seulgi keeps looking into the deep blue abyss, waiting to see something, anything, and she suddenly recalls something she read a very, very long time ago: _and when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you._

“I think he’s going to ask me to marry him,” Seulgi says aloud. She does not expect anyone to be around to hear it — like the metaphorical tree falling in the woods when no one is around, she does not expect her words to carry beyond her own ears, and so there will be no proof the thought exists beyond her own recollection. And Seulgi is very good at lying to both herself and others.

But Joohyun is there. Joohyun hears her say it. Seulgi is not sure when she arrived, but at some point she made her appearance next to Seulgi on the deck. The way a shadow might materialize under new movement from the sun. Sometimes Seulgi feels like that’s all Joohyun is; a shadow in her mind that follows her, something Seulgi could never escape even if she ran from it without falter for days.

But, no. No, Joohyun is real and she leans up against the railing next to Seulgi, and her bare arm brushes against Seulgi’s. “You think so?” Joohyun asks, pressing her hips against the railing so she can lean further over it. She looks down into the water below, the back up at Seulgi. Seulgi has not answered, but Joohyun speaks again anyway.

“Don’t jump,” she says.

**ii.**

She knew Jongin’s family was wealthy from the very first night she met him.

He carries himself like they are. Like he’s tasted the absurdity of that kind of wealth; the tall, glass buildings with his family’s name on them, the cars that come with drivers, the list of various houses in various places, the expensive gold alcohol in flutes. She knows he feels like he _saved_ her. Feels as if he plucked her from a tired existence at her dance company, to be dressed up and made up for others. He feels that he blessed her with his attention, his affections, and kept her from being something that was paraded around, trying to do nothing but please everyone but herself until the day she died.

He lacks the self-reflection to realize what he’s given her isn’t much different from what she already had. She is still dressed up and made up and put on display. She is still a prized jewel to be polished and admired, to be bought in ways that are less straight-forward than the simple exchange of money from one hand to another.

It’s worse now, she thinks. At least when she was a dancer people somewhat admired her for her talents.

**iii.**

Seulgi finds the best way to categorize these people in her life is in the most clinical way possible, less she loses her mind by considering herself one of them.

And thusly:

Kim Jeongnam built an empire, and then he had three sons. There are three Kim brothers.

Minseok, the eldest, whose mother died when he was young. Minseok, whose ambitions lie elsewhere then the monument of his father’s company. But he will have things handed to him in other avenues just as easily, for his whole life, because of his name, and his family, and the sense of entitlement they all possess. He has been married once, divorced once, and has been between girlfriends ever since.

Junmyeon is the second son, but the first son from the second wife. He lives at his father’s beck and call, desperate to be handed any crumbs of responsibility his father deems him worthy enough to handle. Hoping one day, when his father is dead and buried, things might get better for him. He is married to Joohyun. He has no children. His father makes his disappointment with this fact very, very clear.

The youngest — and the most rebellious, but maybe less so now that he is older — is Jongin; he shares the same mother as Junmyeon. A mother no longer married to their father, who spends most of her time in the house in Germany she won in the divorce. Jongin and Junmyeon’s father has a third wife now. Jongin is not married. Not yet.

This where Seulgi comes in.

**iv.**

Seulgi remembers thinking that the ceilings in the Kim’s family home in Antwerp were high. The way you might imagine the ceilings of a church, a cathedral, only no one in this place is very God-fearing.

She had been to the estate in Antwerp before. And the penthouse in Seoul, and the small cottage in the French countryside. The high rise apartments in New York City and Tokyo and Toronto. She wonders if there’s any Kim family home where she hasn’t visited. There must be. Everything about the Kim’s wealth and showcase thereof is absurd, in the very specific way that sours in Seulgi’s mouth like bile when she thinks about it.

(She remembers, once, a fine spread of delicately constructed sushi in Tokyo for Jongin’s birthday. They had been seeing each other for almost a year, back then. This was just after Jongin had asked her to leave the dance company and, for some reason, Seulgi had said yes. She remembers the Kim brothers locking themselves in a room with their father while the rest of them — the wives and the girlfriends and the other associates — waited patiently to be called upon. She remembers how long the sushi sat on the long, finely crafted table in the impossibly large dining room, finished and ready to be eaten, and not even being considered by the men. The men who thought every decision they ever made was always the most important decision being made in the world. She remembers the Kim patriarch erupting from the closed doors like a volcano spitting up lava and demanding all the sushi being thrown away, because obviously it would be spoiled by now. She remembers watching house staff shuffle away tray after tray of thousands of dollars worth of sushi. She remembers they ordered take-out instead.

She remembers it tasted like ash in her mouth and when Jongin tried to kiss her in the car on the ride back to the hotel, she had turned her head away from him.)

They were at the estate in Antwerp for Kim Jeongnam’s eighty-seventh birthday. Seulgi had heard at least a dozen house staff say, when they were foolishly unconcerned with who might be listening, that they couldn’t believe he had lived this long.

He had had a stroke just a week prior. They had supposed, then, that maybe that was that. But it wasn’t.

“I’m sure Junmyeon feels the same way,” Joohyun had agreed with the staff when Seulgi mentioned it, shaking her head and lifting her glass to her lips. She had sat across from Seulgi, the two of them sharing a pair of matching ornate couches. The Kim brothers had been out hunting with their father. Jeongnam’s third wife was taking a nap in one of the two dozen bedrooms.

“He tells you things like that?” Seulgi had asked. She watched the way Joohyun’s fingers curled around the stem of her glass, delicate and manicured.

Joohyun's mouth had upturned at one corner, becoming a smirk. She had raised her eyebrow. “He tells me a lot of things. It’s his fatal flaw. Secrets fill him up until he bursts.”

Then Joohyun sighed, turned to look out the floor to ceiling windows that spread blue-tinged late afternoon light into the room. “Not like I’ll ever be able to do anything with all the things he tells me. Let me tell you something, Seulgi,” and Joohyun had looked very far away from this moment all of a sudden, her eyes glazed over. She had looked beautiful, Seulgi remembers thinking. “Once this family swallows you whole, well — that’s it. There’s no way you’re clawing your way out.”

**v.**

The first time Seulgi met Joohyun, she and Jongin had been seeing each other for only a few months. This is before things went belly up, before Seulgi began to feel the walls closing in around her. Before she would cave to anything Jongin would ask of her because she forgot how to be anyone who didn’t belong to him, forgot how to be herself.

Jongin had said, “my family wants to meet you,” and Seulgi had said, “okay,” and she had let Jongin buy her a dress and jewelry that he had chosen for her. And maybe — maybe that’s when it all started. When she began to relinquish her power over herself one small piece at a time.

Joohyun had her hand curled around her husband’s elbow when she met Seulgi, perfect red mouth wearing a smile when she bowed to her. When she said, “it’s so nice to meet you. To meet the girl who makes our brother so happy.”

Back then, Seulgi had believed her when she said it; she believed people could notice in Jongin that he cared for someone, and that they cared for him in return. Now, she thinks it might have just been another part of the illusion.

The first time Joohyun kisses Seulgi is in the bathroom at a Kim company dinner. They’re both wearing black dresses but Joohyun’s dips lower than Seulgi’s, exposing the way the long column of her throat flows into her breastbone.

She is unceremonious when she kisses Seulgi; they are each sharing one side of the row of sinks, watching themselves wash their hands in the mirror. And then Joohyun is leaning over, and Seulgi is not looking at her directly, no, she’s watching her in the mirror. She can almost pretend she is a spectator to all of this — that it is not her who Joohyun leans into, the fabric of their dresses coarse against one another. Seulgi can pretend it is not her who Joohyun grips the chin of. It is someone else who Joohyun gently coaxes with her soft hands to face her. The illusion shatters when Seulgi breaks eye contact with herself in the mirror, though, and then it _is_ her who Joohyun presses her wine-wet and red-painted mouth against. Seulgi gasps, and it opens her mouth enough for Joohyun to slide her tongue inside of it. Her mouth is soft, like the hand she has on Seulgi’s chin, and Seulgi’s eyes flutter closed as she loses herself in it.

She hasn’t kissed anyone but Jongin in months, at this point. She forgot that other people kiss in different ways. She forgot it can sometimes be something more than a demanding mouth, taking and taking. Sometimes it can be more about the marrying of two people, meeting each other in the middle. She forgot the different ways different kisses could swoop in her gut, unrolling numbness from the tips of her toes, all the way up her legs, to the spot between her thighs. Here it becomes something that is no longer numbness — just an ache, one that’s beginning to be hard to ignore.

Joohyun is still kissing her and Seulgi is kissing her in return. Joohyun pushes Seulgi’s hair behind her ears, and her fingers linger on the shell of Seulgi’s ear. They burn a path of fire across Seulgi’s throat, down the line of her arms. Joohyun touches the hem of Seulgi’s dress, caught a little higher than it’s supposed to be on her thighs, and Seulgi shudders. The pads of Joohyun’s fingers press into the flesh of Seulgi’s thigh.

And then they are gone, and Joohyun’s mouth is gone. She is turning away from Seulgi and looking at herself in the mirror, wiping away the smears of red from the corners of her mouth.

Seulgi looks at herself in the mirror. Suddenly, she is again someone who does not exist at this moment. She is someone watching things happen. She is an omniscient presence who watches her own body from outside of it as it leans over the sink, wipes away Joohyun’s lipstick from her mouth with the back of her hand.

Seulgi looks down at the smear of red against her skin. She’s still looking at it when Joohyun leaves her alone in the bathroom, looking at it and thinking about that one thing she’s heard said. She knows she’s heard it said, but she’s not quite sure who said it.

 _Everything in the world is about sex except sex, sex is about power_ , is what they say.

And who ‘they’ is? Seulgi doesn’t remember.

**vi.**

Seulgi lies awake in bed. It is still the night of the Kim company diner. She can still feel the chalky smear of red lipstick against the back of her hand. She can still feel the ghost of Joohyun’s fingers against her thigh. She can still feel the press of Joohyun’s mouth against hers, and how it felt like lying face up in a body of water and letting the current take you.

It had felt elemental. It had felt like surrender.

Jongin has always taken. He has always asked, a mock idea of something other people would call courtesy, but still: he takes. Joohyun does not ask, but she does not take. Instead, Seulgi offers herself. Or, at least, she offers the parts of herself that she still owns enough of to offer.

Seulgi cups a hand over herself through her underwear. She feels hot all over. She feels like an itch she can’t scratch keeps moving under her skin, like somehow Joohyun has pushed herself right into Seulgi and now Seulgi has no hope of getting her out.

She considers waking Jongin up so he can fuck her. He fucks her less and less now and it’s been a few days since the last time. Or, maybe, more accurately: he asks to fuck her the same amount, and Seulgi denies him more and more.

But, no, she thinks. Tonight would not be any different. Jongin could fuck her and the itch would still exist. It would still flit it’s way around Seulgi’s body, unable to be caught, unable to be carved out. Jongin would fuck her and it would feel like duty. It would not feel like surrender.

Seulgi does not wake Jongin up to fuck her. She slides two fingers past the band of her underwear and into herself, bites on two knuckles to keep quiet.

It still won’t feel like surrender, she thinks. But it will be closer than the alternative.

**vii.**

The Kim brothers go to Hong Kong for work. Seulgi goes to Joohyun and Junmyeon’s shared two-story top-floor penthouse in downtown Seoul and they get drunk. They get drunk and Seulgi lets Joohyun put her fingers inside of her.

It is innocent enough at first. They sink into the expensive couch. “It was a wedding gift from my father-in-law. He imported it from Italy, I think,” Joohyun says. “It’s horribly uncomfortable. I think sometimes expensive things are worse.”

“Do you think Jongin will ask me to marry him?” Seulgi asks.

Joohyun cocks an eyebrow. There are two empty bottles of wine on the table. Seulgi feels boneless and her mouth is that sort of gummy you get when you drink too much wine too fast. Joohyun is finishing the last sips in her glass and Seulgi’s glass is empty, discarded next to the wine bottles on the table.

“Do you want him to?” Joohyun asks.

Seulgi bites her lip. “I don’t know. I’m not sure,” she confesses. “I just don’t know what the point of all of this is if he’s not going to do it.”

“Maybe he will,” Joohyun shrugs. She finishes her wine quickly, the last of it slipping uninhibited down her throat as she tilts her head back with the glass. “If it’s any consolation, of all the girl’s Jongin has introduced to me — well, I like you best.”

There’s a photo from Joohyun and Junmyeon’s wedding hung up on the opposite wall. Seulgi stares at it. Joohyun is beautiful in it, bright-eyed and more happy looking than Seulgi ever sees her now. Seulgi wonders if Joohyun was more in love back then. She wonders if Joohyun looks at Seulgi and sees herself, sees the path she took to get where she is laid out in front of Seulgi. She wonders if Joohyun pities her. She wonders how often Joohyun and Junmyeon have sex.

Seulgi is drunk, and she wants Joohyun to kiss her again.

“That night in the bathroom,” Seulgi begins, breaching a subject the two of them have carefully kept in a box, tied with a ribbon and shoved as far back into their minds as it will go. “That night in the bathroom at the company party, why — why did you do that?”

Joohyun looks at Seulgi and her gaze is sharp. There’s this way that Joohyun carries herself that is so intrinsically linked to the life she lives. Seulgi wonders if anyone will ever look at her and see something like that. If it happens now, or if it’s something that will happen down the line.

“I told you,” Joohyun replies, her words careful and her voice steady. “I like you best, Seulgi.”

Seulgi kisses her. It is hurried and it is messy and it is animalistic. Seulgi curls her hand around the back of Joohyun’s head and pulls her forward and Joohyun follows. It is not like the kiss in the bathroom — the kiss in the bathroom was softer, it was grounded. This kiss is harder, it is more difficult to catch and keep with you. But it is good, and it brings back that ache between Seulgi’s legs, and it feels like surrender.

Seulgi does not expect Joohyun to raise her skirt higher on her thighs, she does not expect the hand Joohyun slides underneath it. She does not expect the searing heat of it, the careful precision, the way Seulgi’s legs fall open further to welcome it.

And that is the most plain truth of all of this: Seulgi does not expect it, but she does welcome it.

**viii.**

The Kim’s will find any excuse to celebrate. They will find any excuse to gather. Kim Jeongnam will take any opportunity to remind his family they are firmly under his thumb.

“What do you do?” It’s Minseok’s newest girlfriend who asks Seulgi this. Seulgi does not remember this woman’s name, but she thinks she remembers Jongin telling her that she’s a playwright. Seulgi wonders how long that might last for.

“I used to be a dancer,” Seulgi replies. “I was in the national ballet.”

“And now?”

“Now,” Seulgi takes a long sip from her glass of wine. Across the room, Jongin speaks to Junmyeon in hushed tones, their heads angled together. Seulgi watches them, and finds she has not the slightest interest in what they might be saying. “Now, I come to these parties.”

Later, Seulgi goes down on Joohyun in the bathroom. Joohyun fists her hands in Seulgi’s hair and pulls like she means it. When they’ve finished, Joohyun wipes herself away from Seulgi’s mouth and says, “she seems nice.”

She’s talking about Minseok’s new girlfriend. “She seems naive,” Seulgi corrects. “Is that what I looked like the first time?”

Joohyun smirks. She presses her thumb into the swell of Seulgi’s bottom lip. Her nail is sharp against the skin there — skin flushed from arousal, flushed from when it was pressed up against Joohyun’s own mouth, from when it was pressed against Joohyun’s cunt.

“No,” Joohyun finally says. “No. I could tell you were different right from the start.”

**ix.**

There is something about fucking Joohyun that feels like Seulgi taking back her power ( _except sex — sex is about power_ ). There is something about holding the secret of the way Joohyun presses her fingers into Seulgi’s skin like a brand. It feels like Seulgi finally, finally has something to hold over Jongin’s head — like an anvil, like the sharp blade of a guillotine — even if he doesn’t know of it.

She and Jongin never fight — Seulgi does not have the energy for it — but she imagines it sometimes. The two of them hurling insults at each other, spitting venom. What Seulgi might do in that situation. How she might allow herself to be the judge, jury and executioner. How, if Jongin ever decided they needed to fight, she might tell him, _I’m fucking your brothers wife_.

It feels like the single bullet in the revolver, and Seulgi and Jongin are playing russian roulette.

**x.**

In March, the Kim’s bring their cousin up into the upper echelons of the company.

The cousin uses his English name — Johnny — because he’s from Chicago. His parents had paid handsomely to have him get into UPenn, and then he had flunked out of UPenn, Jongin had told Seulgi. When his mother had called Jongin’s father she had been desperate.

Seulgi sleeps with him because she can. Because it’s easy. Because if she is the one loading the bullets into the gun, well, she might as well increase her own chances of making it out alive.

He is a boy with a well of confidence he has never properly earned and he fucks like it too. If Jongin fucks her like he wants to possess her and if Joohyun fucks her to remind Seulgi she still belongs to herself, Johnny fucks her in a way that makes Seulgi feel like she is not even a person at all. She forgets who she is. She is no one. She is any other woman who could be picked up from a bar, who could communicate what she wanted through more subtle ways. Seulgi finds no need for subtlety these days: there are simply the people who will indulge her and the people who will not, and she is blunt with one of them and quiet with the other.

Johnny fucks Seulgi in her own bed while Jongin is away on business. Afterwards, Johnny tries to kiss her, but Seulgi moves away from him and slips off the edge of the bed before he can. She sits at her vanity, naked save for the silk red robe she keeps on the seat in front of it. It had been a gift from Jongin. For something, Seulgi doesn’t remember what. Jongin always buys her things. He thinks buying things is how you fix things.

Seulgi gathers her hair on top of her head, ties it messily. The vanity is positioned in such a way where she can watch Johnny watch her; he is sitting up in bed, blankets pooled around his waist. Seulgi is strangely reminded of herself — herself, and Joohyun, and a night that feels a lifetime ago, a bathroom in an extravagant venue, a kiss, a smear of red lipstick against the back of a hand. Power. Sex. _Sex is about power_.

“You won’t tell him, will you?” Johnny avoids saying Jongin’s name, as if the very utterance of it will summon him into the room.

Seulgi scoffs. “What is there to tell him?” She says, and what she means is _this secret is my only weapon_.

Johnny shrugs. Seulgi decides she will, in fact, allow him to kiss her again. She stands above him, at the edge of the bed, and when he tilts his face up to kiss her, she threads her fingers into his hair and pulls.

**xi.**

It is almost an ouroboros. It is almost the snake swallowing its own tail.

But, more accurately: this family swallows you whole, and then you swallow someone else to be set free.

**xii.**

On a big boat anchored off the coast of Malta, all of them wearing boat shoes and expensive sunglasses and big sun hats, Jongin descends to one knee and asks, “will you marry me?”

Seulgi is quiet, for a very long time. Over Jongin’s shoulder, Joohyun watches her from where she stands next to her husband. Then, Seulgi says, “yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> italics in the summary are from [Puppets (Succession Remix)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF5IU-Pyn2A) by Pusha T and Nicholas Britell.
> 
> [fic twitter](https://twitter.com/bIoodbuzzed), [personal twitter](https://twitter.com/sieepwellbeast), [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/bloodbuzzed)


End file.
